The meaning of life

In Education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life (2008), Anthony Kronman, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, contends that questions about the meaning of life which were once studied through the Western tradition have been losing their status as a subject of organised academic study and are now pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities. Questions that the humanities once addressed in a public and organised fashion have now been privatised and the authority to address them, he contends, is monopolised by the churches. Like many others, Kronman places the blame on the modern research ideal and on political correctness. Often resorting to apocalyptic language to make their case, academics like Kronman, though they have no sympathy for the role theology once played, have argued that the university has lost its soul.

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